West Side Story Revisited

As a long-anticipated Broadway revival of West Side Story opens this week, photographer Mark Seliger re-creates scenes from the beloved 1961 film version with the help of Jennifer Lopez and friends. Maria, Tony, Anita, Bernardo, and Riff live again—at least until the end of Act I. Jim Windolf fills in the scenario. Related: “Broadway Goes West,” by James Wolcott.

BORN TO IT
With this pose Jennifer Lopez captures the essence of Anita, the defiant Latina immigrant. Rita Moreno won an Oscar for her Anita in the film version—and would go on to win an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony in a show-business maneuver so rare that it is now referred to as “the Moreno sweep.” While Lopez’s mantel isn’t quite that full, she is equally at ease on-screen, in the recording studio, and onstage.

Styled by Jessica Diehl. Hair by Renato Campora; makeup by Paul Starr; manicures by Nettie Davis; set design by Rick Floyd; production by Cat Burkley.

Lopez’s dress by Hervé Léger by Max Azria; earrings by Neil Lane.

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West Side Story is gang warfare set to music. It’s dance as a weapon. It’s love and death with a Latin beat. West Side Story rocks. The first thing you hear is snapping fingers. That beat. The hoodlums who make up the rival gangs the Sharks (Puerto Rican) and the Jets (Anglo-Irish-Italian) fill the frame in the early going, trying to out-macho one another with charged moves, only to give way to the riveting heroines Maria and Anita.

The inspiration for West Side Story came to choreographer-director Jerome Robbins in 1949. It was just the wisp of an idea at first &hellip; Romeo and Juliet updated for modern-day, urban America. Then, in the mid-1950s, he read newspaper accounts of Puerto Rican gangs fighting it out with veteran neighborhood gangs, and something clicked. Robbins was just the person to see it through. He was no stranger to the meaner side of life, having been born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side long before it was a cute place to meet for drinks. He enlisted the help of three brilliant collaborators—Leonard Bernstein (music), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), and Arthur Laurents (book)—and brought West Side Story to the stage in 1957. Not everyone got it. As Robbins biographer Deborah Jowitt notes, “No previous Broadway musical had ended Act I with two dead bodies onstage and Act II with a third.” But a perceptive critic of the age, Kenneth Tynan, called the show a “rampaging ballet, with bodies flying from the air as if shot from guns.”

Robbins and co-director Robert Wise managed to hang on to that quality for their 1961 film version, which won 10 Academy Awards. Not that Robbins cared all that much about pats on the back from the Hollywood establishment. He put his two Oscars (one for directing and a special award for choreography) in the basement, according to Jowitt. Of the trophies themselves, Robbins complained in a letter to a friend that they had “no faces, no fingers, no asses, no balls, no nothing. They’re bland like Hollywood, they’re gold and glued over.” But the movie has cojones to spare—without stinting on elegance. (Not that certain cojones aren’t elegant.)

A huge West Side Story fan is Jennifer Lopez, who says she watched the film “37 times” as a kid growing up in the Bronx. She was especially attracted to Anita, played by Rita Moreno in the film—a fiery foil to Natalie Wood’s dewy Maria. Says Lopez, “I never wanted to be that wimpy Maria, who sits around pining for her guy. I wanted to be Anita, who danced her way to the top.” With this portfolio, J.Lo gets her wish, and so do we. —JIM WINDOLF